Sunday, August 24, 2014

Man, that convention took more out of me than I expected. They have a big truck full of mobility scooters waiting for people to find out just how far you have to walk in the ExCeL merely to get a glass of water or go to the loo. And then you find out they charge £25 a day for them and by god they can get it, too, even though it is extortionate. I can't spend money that fast, I just sat down a lot. It's been so long since I've seen some people that we almost didn't recognize each other - and after the first day, I realized that if I didn't wear my hair down, no one would recognize me, so I took it down and people started finding me after that. Evidence that you never quite grow up even when you've been around for quite a while is that it still hadn't crossed my mind that my plucky little insurgent pals would someday grow up to be WorldCon Guests of Honor. Wait, aren't you still a teenaged trouble-maker doing funny little fanzines on twiltone? Gosh! (And yet, somehow, deep down, we still are.)

Criminalizing Motherhood: "Nightmarish stories about the criminalizing of motherhood have been making headlines of late. There was Shanesha Taylor, arrested on child abuse charges for leaving her kids in a car to go to a job interview; Debra Harrell, locked up for child abuse for letting her 9-year-old play at a nearby park while she worked her shift at McDonald's; Mallory Loyola, the first woman to be charged under a new Tennessee law that makes it a crime to take drugs while pregnant; and Eileen Dinino, who died serving a jail sentence because she was too poor to pay legal fees from her kids' truancy cases. Other countries provide social programs and income supports for poor single mothers; in the United States, we arrest them."

Radley Balko has Good news from Mississippi - Steven Hayne, a "controversial medical examiner who has testified in thousands of cases, and whose testimony, professionalism and credibility have been under fire for years," finally has his credentials challenged in court in such a way that it might make a real difference, and the court found his testimony to lack credibility. This could actually turn out to be a pretty big deal - although not, alas, for victims whose lawyers realized too late that this "expert witness" was a bit of a fabulist.

"Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession: The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too." (Is it just me, or does anyone else have problems with the way HuffPo loads? I really hate going there.)

Thomas Frank on "Jon Stewart is not enough: The curse of centrism, and why the Tea Party keeps rolling Daily Show Democrats [...] Let me explain what I mean by reminding you of one of the most disturbing news stories to come across the wires in the last month. In a much-reported study, the Russell Sage Foundation discovered that median household wealth in this country fell by 36 percent in the 10-year period ending last year. Wealth for people at the top, as other news stories remind us, has continued to soar. These things are a consequence of the Great Recession, of course, but they are also a reminder of the grand narrative of our time: The lot of average Americans constantly seems to be growing worse. The Great Depression of the 1930s was awful, but it set America on the path toward a period of shared prosperity. Our bout of hard times has had the opposite effect. It has accelerated the unraveling of the middle class itself. Now, you can blame the risible, Ayn Rand-reading Tea Party types for this if you like, and you can also blame the George W. Bush Administration. They both deserve it. But sooner or later you will also have to acknowledge that there are two parties in this country, not just one; that the Democrats held significant power during the period in question, including (for much of it) the presidency itself; and that even when they are not in the White House, these Democrats nevertheless retain the capacity to persuade and to organize. For a party of the left, dreadful news like this should be rocket fuel. For the Dems, however, it hasn't been. Why is that? Well, for one thing, because a good number of those Democrats have not really objected to the economic policies that have worked these awful changes over the years. They may believe in the theory of evolution - hell, they may savor the same Jon Stewart jokes that you do - but a lot of them also believe in the conventional economic wisdom of the day. They don't really care that union power has evaporated and that Wall Street got itself de-supervised and that oligopolies now dominate the economy. But they do care - ever so much! - about deficits and being fiscally responsible. Bring up this obvious point, however, and you will quickly discover what a dose of chloroform the partisan style can be. There's a political war on, you will be told; one side is markedly better than the other; and no criticism of the leadership can be tolerated. Instead, let's get back to laughing along with our favorite politicized comedians, and to smacking that Rick Santorum punching bag."
.

Unbelievably, George F. Will explains that Nixon was a criminal. Not that everyone didn't know that already, but it's fascinating to me that conservatives have thrown Nixon under the bus even though they still seem to think he was "hounded out of office" by evil liberals.

Good on the Public Editor at The New York Times for answering the question, "Was an Accusation of Plagiarism Really a Political Attack?" regarding their article promoting the flimsy charges from right-wing operatives against Rick Perlstein's latest book: "So I'm with the critics. The Times article amplified a damaging accusation of plagiarism without establishing its validity and doing so in a way that is transparent to the reader. The standard has to be higher."

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

"Exiting the Vampire Castle" is an important piece I wish more people who think they are doing good work would read. Look, you grew up here, you're bound to say stupid things from time to time. If everyone who might say something stupid is afraid to speak because they are going to get called out and branded a sexist/racist/size-ist/looksist oppressor for all time, it's not going to do a damned thing to improve the lot of women or minorities or anyone else. The first law of the Vampires' Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class. (Many of what we call ‘conspiracies' are the ruling class showing class solidarity.) The VC, as dupe-servants of the ruling class, does the opposite: it pays lip service to ‘solidarity' and ‘collectivity', while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold. Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires' Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear - the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned."

Marcy Wheeler notes that the government keeps freaking out over The Intercept, thereby raising its profile. "The government has chosen to make it a Big Story that at least one more person has decided to leak the Intercept documents." Well, better that than having to admit their terrorist watchlist is getting to just be a watchlist of people who have nothing to do with terrorism.

Martin Longman in The Washington Monthly, "It's Not Easy to Hold the CIA Accountable [...] By any normal standard, John Brennan would be prosecuted for his actions. But he is being protected by the administration. I don't think this is best explained by the idea that Brennan is doing a good job in other respects. He's a major embarrassment to the administration and protecting him makes them look extremely bad. From the very beginning of his administration, I think President Obama has simply been afraid to take on the Intelligence Community. And his official rationale is morally bankrupt."
PS. Hail Hydra. Seriously, they had to call it Hydra?

Ever since they started lying about alleged falsehoods in Michael Moore's movies, it has been a right-wing tactic to make stuff up about why a particular critique from the left that might get people's attention is academically unreliable. It's not actually a surprise that they are accusing Rick Perlstein of various academic sins. It could be argued that his publisher's decision to put the notes online rather than in the book itself is a mistake (personally, it makes me pretty uncomfortable), but that says nothing about whether the book is well-researched and uses its citations legitimately and properly. Calling it "plagiarism" when the citations are marked in the text, even if you have to go online to read them, is simply wrong. The citations are marked and accessible, it's not stolen material. Perlstein discussed his new book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, as well as the phony attacks, with Sam Seder on The Majority Report.

Mark Regev, deciphered: "This is good. The video above was created by Alex Nunns, who subtitled a BBC interview with Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev. The interview follows the Israeli bombing of an UN school in Beit Hanoun that killed at least 16 Palestinians." (Thanks to commenter ksix.)

"How We Imprison the Poor For Crimes That Haven't Happened Yet [...] 'Evidence-based sentencing' describes the use of data-driven 'risk assessments' in the sentencing phase of criminal trials. This means that people convicted of crimes are given a 'risk score' based on some formula that purports to predict what their risk is of committing more crimes in the future. Are you detecting a few possible problems with such a practice? Yes! I sincerely hope that you are! First of all, these formulas are obscure and not transparent; second of all, the formulas incorporate demographic information such as 'unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members' criminal history' which clearly skew them against members of certain socioeconomic groups; and, most importantly, this practice condones people being sentenced more harshly based on predictions of things they haven't done yet." Via Atrios, who congratulated us for being so generous to the poor.

The little girl in some of the pictures I've been posting is the Baby Hurricane, the child of the best sysadmin in the world. He's a lily-white English cavefish from the West Country, and the baby's mom is dark chocolate Carribean woman who works too hard. So Daddy brings the baby over sometimes to wreak choas in our house for a couple of hours and she just makes me laugh and laugh. In recent photos, she destroyed the District Line, walked on the beach, and held a tea party.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Australian economist Steve Keen discussed his critique of neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported, and his book Debunking Economics, on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd.

Charlie Pierce, "The Tar Comes Home: Almost unnoticed with all the noise surrounding our old friends, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel that aims to bring the world's dirtiest fossil fuel from the blasted environmental moonscape of northern Alberta to the refineries of Texas, and thence to the world, is the fact that a lot of the current mobilization by environmental activists is aimed not so much at the pipeline as at the poisonous glop it carries. Moreover, the controversy over the pipeline has almost completely obscured the fact that the extraction industries want to create a blasted environmental moonscape out in Utah, home of some of the country's loveliest natural moonscapes. Both of these elements have come together in the last week or so. Some 21 activists, many of them from the Ute tribe, were arrested last Monday for chaining themselves to the fence of a construction site in the Book Cliffs Mountains. This fight has been going on, largely out of the spotlight, for years and, once again, our oil-drunk neighbors to the North are behind it. Pretty soon, Joni Mitchell isn't going to be enough of an alibi, folks."

Dan Froomkin at The Intercept, "It's About the Lying: I don't want to understate how seriously wrong it is that the CIA searched Senate computers. Our constitutional order is seriously out of whack when the executive branch acts with that kind of impunity - to its overseers, no less. But given everything else that's been going on lately, the single biggest - and arguably most constructive - thing to focus on is how outrageously CIA Director John Brennan lied to everyone about it. [...] Figuring out how to right the constitutional imbalance between the branches of government, as exposed by this CIA assault on Congress, is very complicated. But doing something about lying isn't. You need to hold people accountable for it. History will assuredly record that President Obama lied about a number of things, particularly as he carried water for the intelligence community and the military. But he's no Cheney. So if you're the president, you fire everyone who lies. Starting with John Brennan."